Market flags

Some markets are now being disputed as invalid for expiring before their time. While I personally unexpectedly profited from this, I don't think this is the right behavior for Augur. People setup the expiration date in a different timezone, and now others may lose money as the expiration is considered premature in UTC. The result may have been know for months (ETH was in no risk of crossing the 1000$ mark in the hours before 2019), certainly during reporting. Some may say "bad market design - next time they will build it better", but there may always be a chance for a technicality.

Examples:

"Will Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, die in 2018?" - This is currently being challenged due to premature expiration by a few hours. There was a chance that Maduro would die in these hours. But even if the market is delayed by a few days, there is also the chance that he died and his death was not disclosed for several days.

"What will be the price of ZRX in USD at 12am UTC on January 26, 2019?" - Currently being called invalid, presumably because it is reported (on veil - the source) as "0.2894" while Augur will only accept 0.28944 ("The outcome field must be a multiple of 0.000012.")

If this becomes a game of "Why is your market invalid?", ordinary people will not use it.

My solution - optional flags, that help interpret the way in which markets should be read. Creators that will mark markets with "Good faith" flag expect it to be read as common sense valid, ignoring minor technicalities that might have influenced the result but did not. A (mutually exclusive) "Strict logic" flag will mean interpret like as written, and so on.

Some markets are now being disputed as invalid for expiring before their time

If you go look at the Vitalik callout thread, clever people have already pointed out that other potential policies have issues

People setup the expiration date in a different timezone, and now others may lose money as the expiration is considered premature in UTC

As far as I'm concerned, market creators should almost always give some leeway in expiration times. It's easy to do, costs almost nothing, avoids uncertainty for traders. The community should therefore enforce strict invalidation of markets with premature expirations. I understand more clarity regarding market expiration times is/has being added to the app as well

If time was the only concern, it would not have been a problem. But now it became an intense debate in several forums about market validity, when the real result is clear. There will sometimes be technical issues, like I mentioned. The question is, is there a way, at least for a subset of markets, to give guides not to be overly strict. People raising issues like replacing ETH with Ethereum and not specifying USD for $. Trust in the system requires that what a normal person reads is the real question, and not some technicalities.

Additional details can always be put into the market, and I would love to see more of that. It helps everyone understand what the spirit of the market is about. Unfortunately, creating good markets is actually pretty tough. It is also relatively easy for malicious users to create markets that test the boundaries of the reporting system, which is why hard boundaries need to be established. Reporters having confidence in the rules helps keep reporting fees low which is good for traders in the long run.

If you are referring to the ETH $1000 market like I think you are, it has so many issues it blows me away that anyone traded on it. Perhaps it was because it looked like a lot of the other (more well-defined) ETH markets around that time. That is unfortunate.

First and foremost, that market expired too early (which is an automatic invalid for reasons discussed ad-nauseum elsewhere). Not specifying a timezone is a subset of that issue. Secondly, it didn't specify a resolution source. That is a huge red flag for that type of market, exchanges have different prices everywhere. Thirdly, you can't just have people assume $ is USD - the $ symbol is used worldwide and means many different currencies. A "normal person" isn't just American. I use $ all the time but I'm not American nor am I referring to USD. I buy crypto with $ all the time, and it isn't USD! Americans are so self-centered, but I digress...

I agree that these are just technicalities, but the market is a question about the price of a cryptocurrency at a specific point in time. But it doesn't specify the price with respect to what, or at what specific time. To me that is just bonkers.

I do agree that if this market came to a fork, a portion of traders would just take their gut reaction as the answer. But if the UI and general community at large just says "hey, well.. wait a second, have you considered x, y, and z?" then the light bulb should turn on. That's my hope anyway.

Markets like these are dangerous to the system in the long run. Proper user education through the UI and various channels like reddit, discord, etc. is key in my opinion.

The idea of "good faith" is valid, especially when the outcome is the same (dude was not dead 3 hours before EOY when market "expired" and dude was not dead when the midnight bell tolled).

The one that will fuck everyone's shit up is the one where the guy gets shot at 23:30 and the market expired at 21:00 thereby creating an incentive to argue FOR "good faith interpretation" as well as to argue AGAINST it.

We haven't really seen that yet, so it's good to argue about it now.

Standards will (probably) be set - wise users and third party overlays may refuse to consider markets that don't, at a minimum:

Invalid will become a tradable outcome on all markets, effectively allowing traders to see the probability of whether the market will resolve to invalid or not, so they can make a more informed decision about the risks of trading on it or hedge their bets by buying shares in Invalid.

v2 sounds brilliant, but I'm not talking about a technical fix. If as a community, some standards are summarized and made well-known, then a market creator can add in the description "Good Faith market" or "Literal", and this will be considered part of the market definition/conditions. This will give the user the peace of mind that he/she will not lose money on some technicality (that may not be known in low volume markets, even if "invalid" is explicitly traded).

Additional descriptive text in the additional details field is definitely encouraged to give traders peace of mind. It's just that anyone can create a market, so many low quality markets exist. A market with just a one-liner in the title (no additional details) that is vague has a high risk of resolving invalid. I see nothing wrong with reporters demanding higher standards for everyone.

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